Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1887-03-16
Mistakes of Young Writers.

Not many months ago the Boston
Courier was quoted from one end of the
country to the other. Its humorous
lyrics gave It a great reputation sud-
denly, and the paper, hitherto unheard
of, went up like rocket. At the pres
ent time, however, we seldom find the
Courier quoted; its verses are popular
no longer-the rocket has fallen stick
had does not differ from the experience
which many other American papers
have had during the last ten years.
The craze for humorous writing has
possessed many newspaper which led
glorious career for few weeks and
then sank into obscurity. The trouble
with the Boston Courier poet seems to
have been that he worked himself out,
and this, we will add, seems to have
been the trouble with most of the news
paper humorists who have hourished
and waned within the last decade.
There is no harder task in the world
than that of attempting the same class
of work for protracted period, and In
the literary profession the hardest kind
of work one can be called upon to sus
tain is humor. We have frequently
remarked that no man can sustain any
kind of literary work unless he mean
while constantly improves and replen-
ishes his mind; he must read study,
converse, see, travel-in short, he must
be feeding his intellectuals all the time
upon variety of food OF his intel
lectuals will surely be exhausted before
his ambition has been satisfied. The
great mistakes of young writer's are
two. The first is in supposing that the
mind is self-feeding machine that is
capable of producing indefinitely and
requiring no special attention at the
hands of the proprietor; the second is
in supposing that the mind is capable
of answering at once the demands of
occasion, no matter how enormous those
demands may be. The brain and the
stomach are twins, and they de-
mand similar treatment The stomach
demands regular refreshment and regu-
lar rest, and so does the brain. If the
stomach doesn't get what it demands, it
makes serious trouble, but this trouble
is mere nothing compared with the
worry, the vexation, and the disap-
pointment that an impoverished and
abused brain will cause a man. It
would be fair, we think, to estimate
that about 80 per cent of the newspaper
writer's in this country neglect their
brains; in this estimate we do not, of
course, include the large number whose
possession of brains is simply an allega-
ton. The humorists, so-called, make a
still sorrier showing; we will venture to
say that 95 per cent of their num-
Der have petered out merely be-
cause they have failed to recognize the
great truth that the intellectual ma
chine must be kept III running order or
it Will not run.
A writer should never play out; he
should do good work up to the years OF
senility, and senility should not come to
him any earlier than it comes to the
blacksmith the merchant, or the
farmer. But just as the blacksmith,
the merchant. and the farmer succeed
in their vocations by exercising pru-
dence and enterprise so must the write:
be willing to work out his ends; he
must be laying in" stock or his supply
will quickly be exhausted; he mus,
study and progress with the world, fol
the world is studying and progressing.
and he who thinks not makes in that
Judgment a fatal mistake Eugene
Field, i9r Chicago NelUs